03/10/2026
This 1,000°C Rivet Has Held the Eiffel Tower Together for 130 Years. Why Not Screws?Why would anyone heat a steel rivet until it glows orange, shove it through a hole, and smash it flat — when you could just twist in a bolt?
It sounds backwards. But the answer is one of the most clever tricks in mechanical engineering.
Heat the rivet to ~1,000°C, drop it through the hole, and pound the tail into a mushroom head. Now wait. As the rivet cools, it shrinks — and that shrinkage clamps the two metal plates together so hard that nothing, not even the brutal vibration of a jet engine or a speeding train, can shake it loose.
That's why aircraft skin, bridges, locomotives, and aircraft carriers still rely on this 19th-century technique. It's also how the Eiffel Tower stayed standing — 2.5 million glowing rivets, one by one.
Then there's cold riveting. No furnace. Smaller rivets. Just raw force. And it's quietly inside the electronics you use every day.
We break both down, step by step.